Ringfort (Rath), Rahans, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ringforts
On the eastern face of a low ridge in County Mayo, a circle of ash and hawthorn trees marks something older than the trees themselves.
Beneath their canopy, a raised earthen platform sits quietly in pasture, and the ring of vegetation is not natural accident but the accumulated effect of centuries of growth along the edge of an early medieval ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead once numbering in the tens of thousands across Ireland and still scattered through every county, though rarely noticed by those who do not know what to look for.
The rath, as this class of monument is properly called, measures roughly 27 metres east to west and 29 metres north to south. An earthen bank survives along its north-western to north-eastern arc, standing nearly two metres high on its outer face at the north-north-west, with a width of almost five metres. Elsewhere, the enclosure is defined by a scarp, a steep earthen face, rather than a built-up bank, dropping about a metre on the southern side. Just outside the bank at the north-north-east, a shallow depression roughly three and a half metres wide and sixty centimetres deep may represent an original fosse, the defensive ditch that would once have run around the full circuit, though no clear evidence of it continues elsewhere. A broad gap of around six metres in the bank at the west is likely where the original entrance once stood. The interior is level, and the north half is largely taken over by brambles. The site sits close to the break of slope, looking out over low-lying damp pasture that stretches some 500 metres east to the banks of the River Moy. A second enclosure lies 250 metres downslope to the north-north-east, suggesting this part of the ridge may once have supported a small cluster of related activity rather than a single isolated farmstead.